coan.net: i like the idea of .mobi though the main site should still detect a mobile device and forward to that domain like facebook and google.

Or a cheaper option is create a subdomain mobile.brainking.com or just m.brainking.com

Fencer: Free mobile testing program: http://mtld.mobi/

Fencer: i will try out opra if I can get the room.

Fencer: IE not much extra space to add extra programs right now

Fencer: I have an HTC Touch running Windows Mobile 6. I get to the DoLogin page and there it sits forever with a blank page

I have unlimited internet on my phone and would love a mobile version. Searching google can easily tell you how to detect if it is a cell phone loging on.

Basically limit bandwitdth(current page most cell phones can't even load not enough memory) and try to format to fit a 240x320 screen.

Fencer: Means you skip directly to the next round without playing anyone. Allows non power of 2 elimination games. Kind of shortform for bypass.

joshi tm: How about a new stat. Right now we have 2 qualities of BKR. BKR and then the more prestigious and important established BKR. How about a ladder BKR above that. Each user can chose to participate in the ladder BKR.

Each Ladder is made up of 1% increments or n/2(n being number of players) witch ever has less rungs. If you are on the ladder BKR list then if anyone on the same rung or rung below you chalenges you, you must except a challenge.

The challenger can chose a time frame range(so I could say 3-10 days per move with vacation) and the challenged sets the exact values. There would have to be a specific value that must be included as a standard(say 4 days + vacations).

Not so rigid as the actual ladders were you pick one to play on. These all that want to be considered for the ladder BKR would play on them. Also they don't need to accept emediately they have say 2 weeks + vacation(so if I am on vacation I don't need to worry about losing my spot while on the beach in Jamaica.) Also better then forcing them to accept games. I was #1 on ludo for a while but did not take games just because I was sick of playing it after finishing 1000 games. I eventually started playing again though.

Fair bit of programing I bet to add it though.

AlliumCepa: I second that one and even made a working model way back when my server could directly access BK.

*For some reason my ISP did not like the 5000 moves every 5 min I was making and blocked me. I wounder why??*

Hrqls: could work as long as it is the creator that choses the weights and they are listed automatically. Or each person gets to chose 1 game as there favovorite and the weights are blindly made that way.

pgt: If you do start using mine I have my own feature request board on my site so any improvements you can think of I will add when I have the time.

http://bk.mctrivia.com

coan.net: Only 1 disadvantage I can see. I would have to download an extra 229bytes for each new colour. This is not bad as long as we don't go adding 1000 different options.

Several ways I can think to reduce bandwidth:
1) Allow all of the options on my CSS maker to be done server side(why send me code I don't look at) http://www.mctrivia.com/bkcssmaker/

2) Fix RSS Publication date bug(well this only reduces bandwidth for my autoplayer)

3) Give option to replace images with text in game boards

4) XML output so your programing customers can write low bandwidth apps for use on Cell Phones and slow internet(this would also let some smart people make real time play possible on this site) RSS feed is already XML output for the game list you just need to fix publication date see 2

5) Use Ajax to replace periodic complete refreshes with refreshing only changed data.

pauloaguia: Maybe you just need to give him more of an assentive. Try getting the names of 10 people willing to become black rooks if he will implement a autopass/automove system that does not require the oponent to also use.

pauloaguia: you would most likely be stuck with no autoplayer from both then.

Jim Dandy: thanks it has been a fun project but I can't wait for the day it is no longer needed. Fencer can you please implement it before I move to the middle of no were. You got 3 to 4 years.

Jim Dandy: By default the ad feature is turned off. To log in go to: http://www.mctrivia.com/autoplayer/login.php there is a check box for the ad feature uncheck it then press update.

coan.net: To fix the fisher clock problem you could give users the option of chosing witch server they are on instead of making it automatic. So if you know you are going to play a 1 hour game you will pre arange to both use the same server. Most people are just going to use witch ever is closest and ideally that would be done automatically for them with the overide option for those rare cases were people are playing super fast games.

Fencer: It may be true that some things like accepting games could have problems with a complete clone but playing them would have no problem at all. If I am playing you I can get the game off the US server(It is cheaper there then Canada) and then submit it back to the US server. You can pick up the game some time in the next week off your local server.

Even board are not that time sensitive since you are not using a real time model like on my server. If someones post shows up 1 or 2 sec late we
can chock it up to just not refreshing at the right time to see that reply before responding.

Things that are really time sensitive like game accepting could be left all on one server so you don't have the update error problems

Just pictures is a workable start. Often I will have a board slow down because of pictures and I have a huge cach.

mctrivia: The big thing is it takes time to code the syncronization algorithms and having a second server farm is not a cheap thing when you are talking this much bandwidth and space. It would though also act as a redundant system. Should one go down everyone can use the one that is still operating.

pauloaguia: Syncronizing servers is a very common task and happens all over the world. The two servers would have to comunicate back and forth any changes that are made. This I am sure would be a lot of data but still a lot less then the data used by everyone using the same server since no graphical data is sent in these exchanges

After reading http://brainking.info/archives/403-The-world-of-delay-and-waiting.html I wounder how hard and how expensive would it be for you to get a clone server in North America? Google is always fast because they have servers on every continent and even most major cities. How about researching your client base and seeing if a North American Clone is worth while.

Would it be possible to be able to imbed parts of an RSS feed into a post? Would be cool if I could put my autoplayer stats into an RSS feed and then have your site auto update the numbers from my feed.

tippyc: I agree. My autoplayer has currently made 67945 for 63 users most of them in ludo. Of course the autoplayer needs to be user based to make most people happy.

Fencer can you please put the actual publication date on the game list feed? I am sure you store this information so you can calculate how much time is left. It is a bit of a pain with the publication date always being the current time I want to know when the game switched over to my turn not what time it is now I can look at a clock for that.

Puckish: yep.

Puckish: For me inposible to make a counter. They are extremely easy to make but you need to have access to the server and I unfortuently do not work for BK.

Puckish: Actually I am making my own feature request board. For now the chat program works pretty well as one.

Fencer: i think he wants to know how many games he won. tied, lost, and timed out on. Seperating lost by defeat and lost bu default. I like extra stats and think just adding number of time outs but not subtracting them from losts would work great. People can't lower there lost number by timing out insteead of loosing and people that don't try o manipulate can do the simple subtraction themselves.

Puckish: I second that. I would love to see the day that my autoplayer is not needed

Eriisa: I have actually created an auto accept system for my AI player but see no reason to make this public as it really is not useful. For now real time chat is what I am working on

Eriisa: yes but mine for gamon currently only does if they lose the first die. I am working on having it calculate every possible combination and see if they result in the same ending though witch would make it do a lot more.

Eriisa: http://brainking.com/en/Board?bc=8848 is the proper board for autoplayer questions there or on the autoplayer site itself http://www.mctrivia.com/autoplayer/login.php that site also lists how often your games should be played depending on which servers you signed up for

Live chat. You can steal my code from mctrivia.com/autoplayer/login.php and make these boards autoupdate using ajax.

Create subroutine that returns array of all new messages since last requested
use ajax to return this from server
in java script add the new data to the begining of the current chat page.

Would speed chatting up a lot and reduce bandwidth because only new messages are sent not the entire page.

Jim Dandy: my system is a working product and has currently made 45000 moves for people on this site. Backgamon is not played to often by it because I have yet to write code to check for more advanced automove siteuations. I solve the chat problem by never playing if the opponent writes a note.

http://bk.mctrivia.com/ - a list of all the programs I have written to do stuff on brainking.com

wetware: often if they are not busy. What we need here is an organised feature request board were we can chat on each request see the state of it(not started,in progress,completee,turned down). That way we know what fencer is up to. Write now he is probably taking a Christmas Holiday.

Andersp: Your obviously not a programmer. Some times if I get an ingenious idea I just can't sleep or do anything else until it is done. Social tasks take the back burner.

coan.net: There is a very limited version made by fencer and there is the unoficial one I wrote at http://mctrivia.com/autoplayer/login.php for mine you can find out who is using it just by going to that page and looking at the list. Actually mine is pretty limited to do to lack of time to write. Plays ludo a lot though

redfrog: I started working on one for playing Ludo but other tasks got in the way and without an xml output page changes make coding dificult

Is there any way the RSS feed could show the correct publication date? If it did it would allow users web sites to show how long ago a user played the last move. And more selfishly I could use it as a reference for my autoplayer to if I have checked that game already or not.

Fencer:I know you are very busy but could we please have a low bandwidth version. A good start would be to http://brainking.com/en/GameList have it crop out everything outside of the "your turn in" table if the get command mbw is appended. This would cut on average I figure about 200kb of data off when I look at the main page and require only two if statements to be added to the code(unless you have some crazy coding practices.)

Obviously later when you have more time that flag should be programed to presist through every link.

AbigailII: 71 bytes * 1000= 71kB * 1000 page loads = 71MB it can ballon quickly. But this one thing would not be the problem. The problem is on a slow connection the page already takes to long to load this would not add much time at all but it would be nice if there was another option say &noextra that gave us a striped down version.

AbigailII: i used
<img src="/images/chess/wr1.gif" title="AbigailII, Brain Rook, Female">

for my refrence to how large an images HTML would be. Of course you would have to add the class="dot" to the image tag</pre>

AbigailII: If rednaz23's idea was used there would only be an addition of 1 byte/game to send to the User. For me this would drastically cut down bandwidth usage because I do not check games that the last message had a note.

coan.net: I don't know how fencers database is but I know on my server I can do several thousand searches a second no problem.

AbigailII : My math was just on the HTML required to display the image

rednz23: a * would be excelent it would only add 1 byte of extra HTML output

AbigailII: Actually a little bit of extra data can add a lot. 1 image at 100characters for 1000 games adds an extra 100kB of data. Some pages are already over 1MB in size on this site for some players. My Auto Player script is already having to download about 2GB of data per day off this site. However in saying that this would actually reduce the data for me since i would not have to download the game to check for a note.

I know I keep requesting it but a striped down version would be nice. Main page just a list of games no extra information at all I have slow internet.

rednaz23: which felowship

can we have detailed right up of what a little bos can do when you go to edit it like the other types. is there anything they can't do(I assume they can't delete the fellowship)

rednaz23: how about accept the games in the waiting room. This would get rid of all the old games also :)

How about a little instant messenger system at the top of the page between the towers. AJAX could be easily used to transfer messages back and forth in real time.